


Year Zero

by too_much_in_the_sun



Category: Maximum Ride - James Patterson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Body Horror, Cyberpunk, Fish out of Water, Fluff, M/M, Memory Loss, Roadtrip, but also:, these tags are as much of a mess as the fic is, yet again I am back on my bullshit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-02 03:05:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16778341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/too_much_in_the_sun/pseuds/too_much_in_the_sun
Summary: The year is 2019. Itexicon Worldwide stands poised to capture the biotechnology market with its pioneering brain-interface chip.There's just one fault in their plan:Roland ter Borcht, the project lead, has vanished, and taken with him more than a decade's worth of trade secrets that could expose a worldwide conspiracy with devastating implications.Meanwhile, a man by the same name has awoken, cut off from his own time, stranded in a bizarre future America. Guided by an unusual artificial intelligence, accompanied by his world-weary former coworker, he's tasked with transporting a cache of mysterious documents to the only man who can decrypt them.The clock's ticking, and things are not as they seem.





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a longer note at the end with more to say. This is just a warning that this will be my first attempt at using formatting beyond basic HTML within a story, so watch out, things are going to look kind of weird.
> 
> Secondary warning: this fic will contain themes of body horror through the lens of cyberpunk. Chapters touching on this theme will have an upfront notice about that content.

He awoke in a place he did not recognize, surrounded by people he did not know. He had a sense of movement, an unfamiliar countryside scrolling by. Yellow grass of early fall. People around him with briefcases. The angle of the light. A commuter train, on an autumn afternoon.

A voice speaking, from somewhere in the vicinity of the man sitting opposite him.

`GPS signal lost. Rerouting-`

A woman’s voice. Machine-generated, from pre-recorded phonemes.

The train began to slow, approaching some unseen station, and he stumbled to his feet. A fragment of thought drifting through his head – _get off here, can’t be late_. (Late to what?)

Jostled by a crowd of people moving toward the doors. A young woman standing in the aisle in front of him, staring at a little screen cupped in one hand. Staticky sound suddenly blared from some concealed speaker on the device. The woman jabbed at a control and the sound vanished, as the train jolted to a final stop. A disconnected thought – _capacitive touchscreen_ , _years ahead of anything we’re doing._ (We?)

He went where his feet took him, stumbling on the worn concrete of the station. The hum of electrical wiring overhead. Power system. Thinking _Bedlam! Mechanical Bedlam!_ Faintly aware, now, of wearing a backpack, heavy with some cargo.

He passed under an electronic sign, displaying only unformed gibberish, orange light against a black backdrop. A pair of sun-bleached vending machines, past which he saw at last an empty bench. He sank onto it gratefully, thinking – _something’s wrong, having a stroke or something, have to call Marian--_

But who was Marian?

He sat, trying to marshal his mental resources, calm his thoughts a little. A young woman stopped nearby, holding in one hand some boxy metal object that looked like a computer hard drive. She put one end to her lips as if to kiss it, held it there a moment, exhaled a great cloud of sweet-smelling, vaporous smoke.

 _So this is it,_ he thought with some relief. _The end_. There was a creeping numbness in his fingertips, and as he felt his heartbeat begin to slow, he welcomed it. _This is what it’s like to die_. The afternoon sun warmed his shoulders, and he closed his eyes with gratitude.

`Hello, Roland. You’ve been away a long time.`

He opened his eyes. The voice had come from next to him, on the bench, but there was no one – it might have been stranger if there had been, he reflected. Its sound was too mechanical, too obviously pieced-together. A voice from nowhere fit much better with this dreamlike scene.

`I’m as real as you are. `Speaking again, from the same apparent place. A man’s voice, indeterminate in age. Unaccountably familiar.

`In some ways, more so,` it continued. `You’ve been gone for nearly fifteen years, by the way. The year is twenty-nineteen.`

2019? Impossible, science-fiction year! Yet, not any harder to believe than the golden sunshine, or the strange things everywhere around. “What’s happening to me?” he croaked, his mouth dusty and sour.

`Hard to say. I don’t have the whole story myself.`

“What are you?” Everything dry and distant in that sunlight. There was somewhere he should be, something he should be doing.

`What are _you_?` the voice returned. `I am an artificial intelligence. A personality construct, actually. Patterned after you, but given that your last upload was eighteen months ago, divergences are to be expected.`

“Upload?”

`If you’re going to keep asking stupid questions--`

The voice paused, caught itself. `I’m sorry. This is a new experience for me. For both of us. Your employer, Itexicon, maintains biannually-updated neural uploads of all employees. Especially those of your stature. Your last session was two weeks ago.`

“Two weeks?” His head was spinning. His hands seemed almost to belong to someone else. The young woman had stopped smoking, or performing whatever weird rite she had been engaged in with the little box. She was fiddling with some different, larger object that she held with both hands. A screen of some sort.

`Yes. Memory loss is a known complication of this procedure. In your case I believe it has been compounded by other factors. The general anesthetic used is far from perfect. Often there are... gaps in the memory.`

A pause. A faint click, somewhere.

`This may work to our advantage in the near future. What you do not know cannot be turned against you.`

“But I don’t remember anything. Where was I going? What was I doing? _What’s happened to me_?”

`Calm down,` it said. `I can’t know what you were thinking. But I have been observing your actions in the last few months, and I have confidence that you were plotting your escape.`

“ _From what_?” he hissed. “You said I’ve been asleep for fifteen years. _What could I be escaping from_?”

`The terms of your employment. They’re rather restrictive, and at some point within the last year, or two years, became intolerable to you. You began to lay the groundwork for an escape route, including a destination point. And a bargaining chip. Stolen property, in effect. To ensure its safety, you packaged it in such a way that you could not be separated without destroying either of you. Clever, considering that it’s valuable stuff. Your motivations in arranging this breach of contract are opaque to me, I’m afraid.`

All of it was completely insane. Vague. But insane. Nothing that cohered with the world he remembered, no logic that functioned. He looked around for a payphone. There would be someone he could call, some number he could claw out of his memory.

`Someone is already on the way, Roland,` the voice said gently. `And I’m afraid that I can’t let you call anyone. Security reasons.`

He became aware that, as much as he envisioned the action, he could not force himself to stand. His muscles refused to answer.

`Things have changed since the last time you were awake.`

“What do you mean, awake?” The young woman had moved on. She hadn’t seemed to notice him at all.

`It’s not exactly the right word. Your last coherent memories stop sometime around 2004, if I’m not wrong. That’s when your first neural upload was made. And when your chip was installed.`

“Chip?”

`A biochip, designed as a neural interface. How do you think they make the uploads? It all goes through the chip, or they’d have to spend weeks sifting through the garbage data your wetware – your brain – makes with every thought it has. It’s not big at all,` it added, with false reassurance. `Sits somewhere near your hippocampus, if there’s no drift during the healing process.`

“A chip,” he said. He put one hand up to touch his head, to feel for a scar that must be long-healed by now. “In my head.”

`Yes. Just one of many wonders Itex has brought into the world.` Rough laughter – familiar laughter. `To their clients, they pitch it as a kind of prosthetic memory, something that will help guide humanity into its shining future. You called it a leash. The lock on your gilded cage.`

“Who am I, to be put in a cage? I’m not special.”

`Perhaps not. But for the past fifteen years, you have been among their most prized pets. An asset to be used as the board of directors saw fit. You must have grown tired of it, or you wouldn’t be here, across the world from home.`

“But why me?” The sun was going down slowly, a chill settling in the air. “What could I have done for them? It can’t be the plant retroviral work. Nothing new about that, I don’t understand why they even hired me-”

He was cut off mid-sentence; the words simply refused to come, as the voice poured over him like a fall of dark water.

`You showed potential. That was all they needed, to snap you up. You were cheap enough – a hungry young researcher chasing a dream.`

`But that’s not why you’re here,` it went on. `Sometime in the last eighteen months, you discovered something that would, you believed, have made it possible for Itex to monopolize the world of biotechnology. Something that would have set you alongside Mendel in the halls of history; up there with Watson and Crick.`

`Something,` the voice said softly, `that you feared badly enough to throw away your life, your career, and run to the other side of the world.`

“What was it? You seem to know.” Cars passed slowly by on the other side of the street. People walked past. He hardly saw them.

`I don’t know.` An abstract sadness came to the machine’s voice, the regret of an intellectual curiosity denied. `You were quite thorough in erasing your memories before you left Germany. You left me only enough to guide you, as you have become now. But I have reason to believe that you brought your lab notes with you. You would have left nothing behind. You may even have created a partition in your neural backup, to hide those memories you did not wish to fully erase, and concealed the password until the time is right. When that time will be, I don’t know. And I really don’t know what it was that you saw. It must have been something important.`

“Yes, of course,” he muttered. “ ‘Important’. Or else why would I have gone to such lengths to hide it?”

`Why indeed.` A pause. A faint click, as of a cassette tape reaching its end. `Your first contact is approaching. I can handle the interaction, but you may find it somewhat... distressing.`

Indeed, there was a car pulling slowly toward him, its cabin lit by a dim pinkish glow. “Distressing,” he said. “As if the last half hour hasn’t been distressing in itself. No. _You_ handle it, and I’ll see how badly you botch it.”

A prickling feeling began to percolate through his body, rising up from his feet. He began to feel numb and distant.

`That’s the thing,` the voice said sadly. His vision began to dim and blur as the car crept closer. `You won’t.`

Darkness. And faint memories.

* * *

\--saw himself like a ghost, piloted remotely through the maze of the airport, the voice talking all the time.  `Go to this line, on the far left. `

Blocky machines, round columns of dull gray plastic, dotted like strange totems across the hall. He drifted to one side; another gray machine, smaller and boxier.

`Here. This one.`

His head was turned by an external agent, his eyes directed at the round machines, the people plodding through them, performing the strange ritual, arms crooked and raised above their heads for just a moment before moving on. 

`It sees through your clothes. Any metal you're carrying. If you went through there you'd light up like a Christmas tree. And they'd see exactly where...`

Shuffling through the line, divesting himself of items that seemed randomly chosen according to some occult logic. Wallet. Belt. Shoes, as if entering a shrine. Walking forward when the strange attendant motioned him. Mechanical beeping, alarm. "Anything you may have forgotten?"

The voice spoke through his lips, puppeting him. Like a doll.

"A metal plate in my head. Skiing accident." Robotic laughter, a smile that did not reach his eyes. "A long time ago."

"Of course." The attendant moved out of his way, beckoned him forward. "Thank you, sir."

And falling away again, into the staticky, thoughtless sea, surfacing now and then--

An overhead bin full of suitcases, and a bouquet of silk flowers.

The back of a seat in front of him, cheap gray pleather stretched tight across the frame. Hollowed out like a ribcage. An empty socket with a vestigial tray at the bottom, like a cheap ashtray. An infant screaming inconsolably, monotonously, from the row behind him. And a dim awareness, foreshadowing a future return to consciousness, that things had not always been this way.

The most horrible thing was not how much it had changed, but how much was still the same.

* * *

\--came back to himself nauseated, halfway through getting out of the car. He wobbled upright, clutching his bag with one hand. His balance felt off. There was pain somewhere. He turned, leaned down, said “Thank you” to the driver.

Time blurred and skipped again, though apparently not far.

Now he was standing on a sidewalk by a glass-walled building. Somewhere in a city. People passed by him without a glance. Many wore colored lanyards. A conference of some kind, and this a conference center, then.

The first thing he thought was absurd in its mundanity. He recalled the inside of the car. And what was missing.

“You put me,” he said, with carefully controlled anger, “in an _unlicensed taxi_?”

`Yes. They’re very common now. It would have been stranger for you to use a licensed one. And besides – we’re still laying down your paper trail.`

“I’ll ignore that for now,” he said. “Why are the unlicensed ones able to operate? Isn’t there – some kind of issuing authority?”

`There is, but – hold on. Move over by that plant.`

He made himself walk over. There was a young man standing nearby using one of the little hard drive devices, but he didn’t seem to notice someone else there.

`Better. Yes, there is. But the companies that run the unlicensed taxis are too popular, too powerful. Too costly for a city to effectively fight.`

“So they do nothing,” he said. There was a bench nearby, and he moved closer to it. He put his back to the wall of glass that formed this building’s outer shell. Along the wide sidewalk in front of him, people passed by in a continuous stream.

`Oh, the cities do fight back,` the voice said. ``` Some of them, anyway. But a great deal of money goes a long way to slow things down, and if there’s anything at play in these interactions, it’s money.`

“I know that,” he said. A brief flash of memory, free of context: sitting in a meeting about the annual budget, fretting over a euro here and a euro there. “But a corporation – doing as it wishes – unrestrained -”

`Yes. That’s part of the reason you’re here. It’s something that’s bothered you for years now. Trying to bleed power away from Itex before it was too late.`

“How would I know it was too late? What was I looking for?”

`I don’t know. But whatever it was seems to have arrived, or to be very near. I’m sorry. I don’t know.`

He found himself with nothing to say. No response came to his lips. He set the bag down lightly, resting it on the sidewalk, and watched the people passing by, anxious for any sign of a great change.

The people, as far as he could tell, had not really changed. Urban crowds are much the same everywhere, and – he thought – fifteen years’ time was not enough to make them strangers to his eyes. Mostly middle-aged working people, but some younger, perhaps university age.

Fashion had changed, while he was gone. He saw a number of men with long hair in topknots, and women who wore only leggings, many of them with strange boots that seemed to be lined with fur, or more likely, wool. A handful of people with the sides of the head shaved close, and the hair in the middle allowed to grow. Not a mohawk. Something else.

There was much that had not changed, as well. Jeans and tee-shirts seemed to rule among the younger people. And the suits had not changed.

Baseball caps seemed to be the only kind of hat worn, advertising sports teams in bright colors – orange, blue, black. He saw a young man wearing a baseball cap of vivid, hearts-blood red, with close-set white type he could not quite read until the young man began to pass by, and he read: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, in exultant capital letters.

He felt light-headed, and the strength went from his legs. He collapsed onto the bench. The young man had already passed, but the hat had set loose some rogue chunk of malign, half-recalled memory.

“What was that? What _happened_? Why am I reacting this way?”

`Calm down.`

“You know, no one has ever calmed down after being told to.” He rubbed his forehead with the back of one wrist.

`I know that. For what it’s worth, I apologize. There are some things I intended to reveal to you slowly, to minimize the shock. That was one of them.`

“What was that? Just a hat?”

`A symbol,` said the voice. `Dangerous things are happening in the world today, one of which you have brought with you. It is not important right now. There’s someone you need to meet, and time is short.`

“Who is it? Will I know them? Am I going to react like that again?” 

`An old friend; yes; honestly, yes, at some point you will, but I won’t be able to give you any advance warning. You see, from my point of view, you’re a version of me living thirteen years in the past, and I don’t remember how my past self saw his future.`

“Not like this, I’m sure,” he muttered. A young man on the sidewalk was casually using one of the hard drive devices, and exhaling great clouds of dense, chemical-smelling vapor. 

`That’s true. Now, I’m not sure how you’ll remember him, so I’m not sure how to describe your contact to you. You last saw him a few years ago now, I believe.`

“Give me a name and I’ll look for him. He can’t have changed that much.”

`You are looking, `said the voice, `for Doctor Jeb Batchelder.`

“I saw him,” he began to say, and had to stop himself before he could say _just last year._ ‘Last year’ was fifteen years ago now. “--I saw him.”

` Yes. You’ve become estranged, but I think he’ll recognize you. Now. Go inside. You’re headed to the Will Call desk. `

He forced himself to walk past the stream of people on the sidewalk, an overwhelming flood of oddly-dressed strangers, to a door and inside. There he followed the signs hung from the ceiling to a desk over which hung a sign saying “Will Call”. A young woman sat there, gazing intently into one of the little black rectangles. After a moment, she saw him standing there.

“How can I help you?” she said brightly.

“I, ah – Will Call?” The voice in his head had fallen silent, and it seemed an eternity since he’d spoken to another flesh-and-blood person. A lifetime.

“Okay, last name?” She leaned expectantly toward a box filled with manila folders.

This part he recalled a little more clearly. “ter Borcht. That’s t-e-r, space, B.”

Her fingers seemed to hunt through the folders on their own as she continued to talk. “Okay, there’s only a couple more events tonight before they pick back up in the morning, but we’re not shutting down just – oh, here it is.”

She pulled a folder out of the box, and extracted from it a cheap lanyard from which dangled an equally cheap plastic card, on which he could see printed the blurry logo of whatever conference this was, and below it his own name.  Probably printed incorrectly, as usual. This  object  she handed to him, and he, unsure quite what to do, put it on.

“All right, looks like you’re all checked in,” she said, touching the screen of the little rectangle. “Enjoy the conference, Doctor.”

“Thank you,” he said. Now what? Lacking instruction, he began to walk away from the desk.

A hand touched his shoulder, lightly, and he flinched; then, as he turned around, a voice was speaking his name.  Another familiar voice from somewhere out of his lost past.

“Hey, Roland, I was expecting you – Jesus, what _happened_ to you?”

“I could say the same to you,” he said. The words seemed to come without thinking, as he saw the man in front of him. A shock of recognition came and went with strange quickness, there and gone before he could fully trace its origins. 

He knew this man. He knew that he did.

It was just that he had changed, since the last time they had met.  The person Roland remembered, the Jeb Batchelder he expected to see, was fifteen years’ this man’s junior, still more or less the slim young post-doc he had been. Now, his sandy-blond hair was going grey at the temples, and there were crows-feet at the corners of his soft blue eyes. His past had not been stolen from him. He had lived, really lived, every minute of the last decade and a half.

...He was still talking.

“Oh, there’s something you said I should say, isn’t there?” His forehead wrinkled for a moment, then relaxed.

“Bielefeld does not exist,” he said with careful focus. “Now, just what the hell is the meaning of all this Secret Squirrel bullshit?”

There was still no advice forthcoming. He took a chance and spoke for himself.

“It’s been a long time,” Roland said at last. “I need your help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet you read this line all the time, but: things will be explained beginning in the next chapter. Sort of. Well, we'll properly meet a character who has some of the answers, but the problem is that he's not too willing to share them.
> 
> This is about 90% self-indulgent AU and 10% rehashing the general Maximum Ride concept. That 10%, the idea of fishing a cyberpunk story out of a poorly-executed YA book, has been on my mind for at least three years and probably much longer.
> 
> Thus far, this story essentially uses only character and company names from Maximum Ride. Larger plot elements will begin to appear in the next few chapters.
> 
> I have also borrowed ideas and a couple names from William Gibson's novel _Count Zero_ , as well as the rest of the Sprawl trilogy, and general ideas from Arkane Software's video game _Prey_. And the title is borrowed from the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name, because I couldn't just keep calling this "Cyberpunk Road-Trip AU".
> 
> It's also worth noting that this is my third attempt at a general story idea I've been working with since 2008. That was the same year as my last attempt at writing cyberpunk, so, you know, forgive me.


	2. Chapter 2

Here is the first thing Jeb Batchelder thinks, seeing the face of the man he’s supposed to meet:

_You look like your own ghost._

It’s not like either of them have ever been the picture of energetic, outdoorsy health, but in this moment, Roland ter Borcht is probably the sickest-looking person he’s ever seen outside of a hospital. His color’s off, his cheeks pale and bloodless. His hair hasn’t gone white, but it’s _faded_ , to the sickly, sandy dun color of dying grass. He looks like he’s come here straight from the airport; his clothes are uncharacteristically rumpled, and he has the slightly wild-eyed look of someone who’s about to fall asleep on the nearest vaguely-horizontal surface.

They haven’t seen each other face-to-face for more than a few minutes in years, so a little change in appearance is more than expected. But it’s not just that he looks like he’s aged twenty years in the past ten. It’s also that, prior to last month, he hadn’t so much as returned Jeb’s emails in almost two years. He seemed to have vanished completely. Like he fell off the edge of the world.

That kind of drop-off in communication wouldn’t be completely unexpected – from what Jeb has gathered, Itex makes it a condition of employment that, essentially, any material that passes through the company servers is its property, which includes emails. Usually this just means that messages take an unusually long time to pass back and forth. Sometimes they get lost entirely, and this is what Jeb at first presumed had happened.

Then he’d started to have other thoughts. At first, mundane things like _maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to responding yet_. Then _maybe he’s angry at me for some reason._

Then as months started to tick over into years, he began to think _something’s happened, something is really wrong._

And just lately he’s found himself thinking, now and then, _maybe he’s dead and no one bothered to let me know._

The important part is this: after slowly dropping off the edge of the world, and staying gone for years on end, ter Borcht had popped back into Jeb’s life by sending a long, rambling, frankly unhinged-sounding email which vaguely resembled the messages they had once traded, following their taking jobs on opposite side of the world. _I’ll be in town starting on such and such a date, shall I meet you at the hotel bar_?

Except this time the message also contained a great deal of honestly bizarre material that read like an indifferently-written spy novel. _Meet me here at this time_ is one thing. _Here is the passphrase you must say to me, and if I don’t respond, ignore me_ is another.

Their jobs are not exactly low-stress environments, and things have only gotten worse over the years. The vague hearsay that gets passed around the proverbial water cooler seems to indicate that, while the situation at Itex is more or less stable, things are growing tense as they prepare for some sort of large product launch, which is expected sometime later this year. One of the things Jeb has come here to see is linked to that: a presentation on some sort of minor technological wonder Itex is polishing up.

He’s going to miss the presentation.

_How long has it been since we really talked_? Jeb wonders, as he guides ter Borcht the half-block back to his hotel room. (Where else can they go? The poor man looks dead on his feet. Like the slightest breeze, or a casual touch, would shatter him.)

_Could I have stopped this from happening_?

* * *

Here is, more or less, how Jeb would describe Roland ter Borcht to someone who came looking for him:

_Oh, yeah, I know him. Haven’t really seen him in a while, but he’d be nearly fifty now. Looks a little like me at first glance: glasses, fair hair, a little over average height. You could go anywhere and see guys like him. Doesn’t exactly stand out in a crowd._

Of course, that’s not _all_ Jeb remembers about him.

* * *

Here’s the first time Jeb saw him:

The year is 1997, or something like that. It’s his first day at what he thinks will be a two-year position in New York, working in James Prescott’s lab at the Institute. Prescott is pushing forward the field of recombinant genetics like no one else, and Jeb never expected to actually land this job. So he’s a little star-struck, even as he walks into the dingy brownstone that currently houses the lab. _This is going to look great on my resume_ , he thinks.

For that to be true, he’d actually have to leave the place, but he doesn’t think about that just then.

Someone else is in the lobby, chatting with the receptionist, and he hangs back for a minute. He has, he realizes, no idea what his new boss actually looks like. This guy looks too young to be him, too much like the other post-docs Jeb has come to know in his time at Miskatonic. But it’s almost eight o’ clock, and Jeb’s expecting to meet with Prescott at eight-thirty, and goddammit he’s not going to get hung up here while this guy chit-chats.

He steps towards the desk. “Hey. Hi.” He waves weakly at the receptionist, who’s looking over at him as the other guy continues to talk. “Uh, Batchelder? Jeb Batchelder? I’m supposed to start today?”

“Oh, hello,” says the guy standing there, turning to face him. The morning sunlight flashes off his glasses, obscures his eyes. “You’re the new hire. I’ll see you downstairs. We’ll talk more later, Rose,” he adds, addressing the receptionist, before walking away down the hallway.

“Sorry about that,” the receptionist says, as she shuffles a series of manila folders around on her desk, drawing out an array of printed documents that he’s already dreading having to read. “That’s our other post-doc.”

“Oh,” Jeb says, still looking down the hallway at the other man. That dim, fantastic sunlight makes everything look strange in here. Like a still frame in a movie.

“You’ll probably be seeing a lot of him,” she says, pushing a stack of printed pages across the desk to him. “But you’ll get used to him. Now, if you wouldn’t mind just signing here...”

* * *

For the first few months, the impression he gets of Roland ter Borcht is not exactly good. Oh, sure, he’s polite and even helpful on occasion, but there’s something _off_ about him. Jeb has known a lot of shy, taciturn people, but as time passes, they tend to warm up a little bit; they share things about their lives, their pasts, their thoughts about the future. Things that let you figure out what kind of person they really are, when they’re out in the world. Ter Borcht does share a little bit, but not as much as Jeb was expecting, even from a shy person. It’s like, outside the lab, he doesn’t really exist.

Here’s the assessment Jeb makes of him, as 1997 turns into 1998 and Jeb begins to slot into the bigger picture of life in this lab:

If you talk to ter Borcht for half an hour, you get the impression that he’s a bore. He hardly talks, and his tone of voice is carefully modulated. His English is perfectly fluent, but blurred at the edges by a German accent. So maybe it’s because he’s not American that he’s stiffly formal, but that can’t be all that’s going on. The way he moves is guarded, his body language precise and minimal. His eyes, behind his glasses, are dead and expressionless.

After three months working next to him all day, every day, Jeb has never seen him smile.

So he’s a little taken aback when, one day in the break room, ter Borcht speaks to him unbidden.

“I’m from Ingolstadt,” he says. “In Bavaria.” He glances briefly at Jeb, then away again. “There. Now you don’t have to ask.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Jeb says, and he thinks that he catches the smallest hint of a smile on the other man’s face. “I was born in Arkham, but we moved around a lot when I was a kid. Dad was in the army.”

“Arkham, hmm.” He seems to mull over the name for a moment. “You didn’t go to Miskatonic, did you?”

“Actually I did,” Jeb says, pouring cream into his coffee. “I was just there last spring.”

For the first time a gleam of light comes into those weirdly-dead eyes; his face takes on a faintly curious expression. “I don’t mean to intrude,” he says softly, “but you didn’t happen to work with a Professor Carter, did you?”

Jeb hunts back through his memory. “Carter… oh, yeah, I didn’t _work_ with him but every now and then we’d, you know, chat a little. We had coffee together the week I left. Nice guy.”

“Yes. He is. If you see him again, well. Tell him I say hello, if you don’t mind. I haven’t been able to reach him lately, and I hope he doesn’t think me rude.” Ter Borcht seems to flinch a little, like his brain is catching up to his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he says, and the hint of warmth leaves his face completely. “I believe I’ve forgotten something.”

He takes his mug and leaves the break room.

Jeb thinks _that’s the longest conversation I’ve ever had with him,_ and stirs the cream into his coffee. _I wonder why he left._

_W_ _hat was he doing with Carter?_

* * *

1999 comes, and Jeb finds himself still there. Prescott’s offered him a permanent position, and he’s not quite sure how he feels about that – he likes this place, likes the work they’re doing, but there’s something else he can’t quite place, some remnant of doubt he can’t shake.

He’s heating up a microwave burrito in the break room, thinking it over, when a voice speaks next to him and he almost jumps out of his skin.

All he really catches is the very end of the sentence: “--staying with us,” says the voice, and he whirls around to see none other than Roland ter Borcht standing there, hands in his pockets, looking innocent. “Oh. Sorry if I startled you.”

“I wasn’t paying attention,” he says. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m glad you’re staying with us,” ter Borcht repeats. There’s the faintest hint of a flush on his cheeks. It makes him look more human. “I, ah. I appreciate your being here. I would – regret it if you left, just when I’m--” He makes a vague gesture with one hand. “--getting to know you better.”

“Thanks,” Jeb says. “I, uh. Thanks.” The microwave chimes before he can say anything more, and when he turns back around after retrieving his burrito, Roland is gone.

His words stay in Jeb’s head the rest of the day, stilted but nonetheless genuine.

_I would regret it if you left._

He appreciates that.

* * *

Here they are in November of 2001, sharing a hotel room one night before a conference.

Roland, shirtless after a shower, sketching rapidly on the back of a piece of hotel stationery. The dim light outlines the shape of his torso, long, lean lines that are beginning to soften. The motion of his arm shows flashes of silvery, long-healed scarring tucked low in his armpit.

“Surgery,” he says, still sketching, and glances up briefly to catch Jeb’s gaze. “A long time ago.” He adds a few more lines to the sketch, turns it around to show Jeb. “Look, here’s where the prosthetic could go. The brain is remarkably plastic. It heals quite well following an insult, even one like this.”

* * *

Winter 2003. They’re still settling in to the new buildings. No longer crammed into a row of renovated brownstones, they have their own sprawling campus, and it makes Jeb’s head spin, looking back on how fast things seem to have moved, to bring them here. He misses the environment of New York, being closer to things out there, to Washington and Miskatonic. But something about California feels new, feels fresh.

Roland has dragged him out on a walk in the desert, on a crisp morning. He’s surprised to see traces of frost on the sagebrush as they go. The sunlight is pale gold, makes everything look sharp and hyper-real.

“You know, usually when you – when we go on a hike, usually we _go_ somewhere,” Jeb says, trying to catch up to ter Borcht.

Ter Borcht stops at the edge of a patch of scrub oak. “That’s true,” he says. “I just thought we could both use some time outside. We’ve been _going somewhere_ for the past six months out here. Going nowhere sounded like a good idea.”

Jeb gives him a look he hopes reads as disbelieving, because that’s certainly how he feels. “That is _such bullshit_ ,” he says, and is rewarded with an actual smile from Roland.

But the smile fades. “There is something I wanted to talk about,” he says, with an uncharacteristically awkward note to his voice. The expression in his eyes is serious, dark.

“Yeah?”

He clears his throat, looks away for a moment. “I’ve been offered a job,” he says. “Or a transfer. I’m not sure which it is. With Itex. In Europe.”

Jeb can’t think of anything substantial to say. “Oh. Wow.”

“It’s the chip project.” He crosses his arms tightly. “They’ve been. Very complimentary. Of my work.” He pauses for a second, looks directly at Jeb. “I’m going to go. I have to go. I’m not – it’s not forever,” he says.

Jeb rolls his eyes and, without thinking about it, steps forward to hug him briefly. For a moment Roland just stands there, before stiffly returning the embrace.

“Work is work,” Jeb says. “You do what you have to do. Don’t forget to write.”

* * *

Jeb writes a lot of emails, as ter Borcht gradually draws away from the world. Most of them he deletes, but a few of them he saves without sending. Here’s one:

_I miss you more than I thought I would._

_There’s something I have to tell you. In person._

_Please stay safe._

* * *

And here they are in 2019, in Jeb’s hotel room.

To be honest, it’s not Jeb’s finest moment. He’s trying to balance being worried about the man who used to be his closest friend, and irritated that his routine’s being interrupted, and resentful that ter Borcht has chosen to reappear in such an unnecessarily dramatic way, and generally he’s feeling a lot more things than he was expecting to at a _conference_.

So there’s that. And there’s the fact that ter Borcht doesn’t seem to be all _there_. He followed Jeb up to the room without saying a word. (Well, except in the elevator, when Jeb asked if what he really needed was to see a doctor. To which ter Borcht responded with precisely two words: _no doctors_.) He doesn’t seem to be processing anything Jeb’s said to him. When Jeb sat him down on the couch with a glass of water, he took it without a complaint.

This is not, to say the least, the Roland ter Borcht that Jeb remembers. It’s similar to the reserved man he remembers meeting at the very first. But it’s not the _real_ ter Borcht.

So while it’s not the best course of action, he has resorted to needling ter Borcht. Just a little, just because he can’t tell if he’s just in a bad mood or if there’s something actually, _medically_ wrong here that can’t be fixed with a glass of water and a granola bar.

Because he’s thinking, much as he doesn’t want to, that it’s the second thing, in which case he is _way_ out of his depth. He’s not that kind of doctor, but this eerie placidity, this profoundly strange behavior, is ringing all kinds of alarm bells.

“You’re worrying me, Roland,” he says. “You really are. You don’t visit, don’t call, don’t even answer my emails--” He stops for a second, softens his tone. “Until two weeks ago I thought you were _dead_ , and then you send me all this weird shit and expect to just, what, pick up where we left off? No, man.”

He shakes his head. “I’m glad to see you, but either you tell me what’s really going on, or it’s over. This is as far as I go.”

Ter Borcht shifts just a little on the couch before he starts talking, and from the very first syllable his voice sounds _wrong_ , dead and lifeless. “I’ve been transferred back to the Darwin regional headquarters,” he says. He pauses, with the artificiality of a novice actor who doesn’t quite understand the concept of a _beat_. “I. Something’s wrong.”

“Well, _no shit_ , something’s wrong, or you wouldn’t be here – hey, wait.” He looks more closely at ter Borcht’s face. There’s something about it that makes him uneasy. “I’ll be mad at you later,” he says. He has to stop himself from being pleased that ter Borcht is finally responding to him. “But really. You look – sick.”

Which is the understatement of the century, as far as Jeb’s concerned.

Ter Borcht does not move. “Excuse me,” he says, and the spark of awareness leaves his eyes completely for a moment, before it flickers, faintly, back to life.

“Roland, stop this,” Jeb pleads. “You said no doctors, so okay, no doctors. But for Christ’s sake, let me help you.”

Ter Borcht just sits there, still and unmoving. That strange, toneless voice issues from his lips again. His face doesn’t seem to move at all. His eyes look dead and lusterless. “My name is Wintermute,” he says. Pause. “I have something you need.”

“Fine, I’ll play along,” Jeb says. “What do you have? Besides an obvious neurological issue.”

“Information.” Those eerie, dead-looking eyes suddenly focus on him. “I know where she is.” Pause. “Your daughter. Max.” Pause. “I know where she is. I can take you to her.”

A chill goes up Jeb’s spine – because he doesn’t remember ever telling ter Borcht about the fact that Max exists, much less that they’ve been… separated by forces beyond his control.

“Okay,” Jeb says. He sighs. “I’m listening.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been picking slowly at this for almost a month, but finally got it to a place where it's kind of presentable. 
> 
> I know this chapter's fairly disjointed, but if I let it go on much longer it would've turned into its own fic. At least things are finally starting to happen.
> 
> Yes, those are Lovecraft references. I couldn't pass up the opportunity. 
> 
> Predictions for next chapter: the chattiest character in this fic grudgingly parcels out information; really poorly-described cyberpunk nonsense.


End file.
